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MN: You also mention that your father had pigs at one time.

RN: He had...

MN: Pigs. Pigs. What happened?

RN: Yeah, he had, he had pigs in the backyard. Well, our farm, he had 'em in the back. He had, if I recall I would say he had about fifteen pigs in all.

MN: What happened to the pigs?

RN: Well, all I know is he got rid of 'em. He sold 'em, so he must've sold 'em to that slaughterhouse which was about three miles from our, from our farm, on a dirt road. He sold 'em and he got rid of 'em, in a way.

MN: Have you ever been to the slaughterhouse?

RN: Oh, yes. When we were kids we used to walk over there. We used to walk over there and we used to sit and see 'em kill, kill the pigs. Not the same pig, but kill animals there.

MN: Did it smell at the slaughterhouse?

RN: Oh yeah. Yes. It's a small slaughterhouse. It wasn't a big, big one.

MN: Now, how often did your family eat meat?

RN: Oh, I don't know. We ate it pretty often, I know. Yeah. We never had chicken, though. Those days nobody ate, nobody had chickens. Well, some of 'em do, did. There was a white dairy farmer on the edge of our, on the edge of our farm, and he would raise, he had milk cows, and he would... chickens, and he would eat chickens all the time. But we never had chicken hardly at all.

MN: What kind of meat did you eat?

RN: It was always beef. My father would pick it up at the market in town before he came home. It's always the same kind of meat. It was always, if I recall, it was usually, always it was short ribs. They would slice it to make Japanese okazu. That's all.

MN: What did you do with the leftovers? Did you put it in an icebox?

RN: I don't, I don't know if we, she just kept it in the pantry with, we never had no icebox or refrigerator.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.